Episodes of the South

EPISODES OF THE SOUTH: NEW POINTS OF VIEW

Goethe-Institut project will include debates, research, exchange programs and artistic and academic works using new points of view and ways of thinking about Germany, Europe and the world. More...

13.12.2017

Echoes of the South AtlanticOn the Future of the Southern Transatlantic Relations

The project Echoes of the South Atlantic poses the question of the future of the Southern Transatlantic relations, particularly concerning the past, present and future role of Europe, and sets out to explore possible answers through a multi-disciplinary, multi-spatial and multi-temporal approach.

Until the 15th century, the Atlantic was a perceptible border between Africa and Europe on one side and America on the other. The overcoming of this border was followed by the well-known history of “discovery”, colonization, enslavement, exploitation, migration and wealth in Europe. The exchange between the three continents thus became more dynamic and resulted in a cultural linkage that changed the three continents fundamentally. Meanwhile, the political, cultural and economic constellations have changed and Europe is losing its relative importance. At the same time, the mutual interest and exchange between Africa and South America is increasing. How do matters stand with the Atlantic Triangle in the 21st century? What impulses can be expected from the (South) Atlantic cultural area? How will Europe position itself in the future?

The project Echos of the South Atlantic takes upon these questions and thus is particularly driven by the puzzle of the future of the Southern Transatlantic relations. What kind of position will Europe assume vice versa Africa and South America after having played the role of a colonial hegemon – in different nuances – for the last 500 years? Will the movements across the Atlantic take other directions in times of globalization and digitalization then they used to – towards or away from Europe and North America? Will the “burden” of the last 500 years on one side and the “privilege” on the other be reversed, balanced or generate something completely new? How to deal with knowledge and findings from the past in regards to future trajectories? How to ascertain social, economic, political and cultural developments in the respective world regions? Which histories lead the way to the future and which cultural strategies and innovations can improve life on earth substantially and sustainably?

First Step: Conference in Bahia

The conference Echoes of the South Atlantic – On the Future of the Southern Transatlantic Relations in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) at the end of April 2018 is the beginning of a project, initiated by the Goethe-Institut, dealing with the above thematic complex. Artists, academics and intellectuals from the three continents – Africa, South America and Europe – will come together for a first exchange in this city of salient historical relevance in this context.

The main aspects are

- New historiographies
- Migration and displacement
- Civil societies of the future
- Democracy
- Art and science as hybrid forms of knowledge production

This concept will be continuously updated and amended following the conference, hence mirroring the idea of a fluid and hybrid process.

05.11.2017

Festival of the South

Goethe-Institut and Sesc São Paulo bring Episodes of the South project to a close with lecture, performance, documentary and panel discussion.

From November 6 to December 1, the Goethe-Institut, in partnership with Sesc São Paulo, presents the Festival of the South, to celebrate the completion of the Episodes of the South project, which between 2015 and 2017 sought to foster new views and contributions from the "South" in the arts, science, and culture.

This lecture will explore various angles of the notion of the Global South from political, economic and philosophical perspectives, examining the conditions of peripheral regions (Africa, Asia, Latin America) during the post-Cold War period and expansion of globalization, focusing on issues about the potential of social thought produced in the South. Who today has the intellectual legitimacy to put forward a global vision? Who can propose new universal paradigms? What are the limits to thinking about the world from the South?

This installation explores the dynamics between artist, art, and audience. Eight artists stage a performance inside each section of the rotating carousel, powered by exercise bikes. Every hour the carousel stops and the audience can interact with the performances.
This carousel is entirely devoted to antipodism – trying to understand how things could have been if circumstances were reversed. Antipodia is a productive thematic platform with a single rule: everything must be 'au contraire', 'vice-versa', 'head down, feet up'.

Panel discussion about the relationship between dispossession, rights, privilege, with Diran Castro, Lia Vainer Schucman and Elaine Lima do Nascimento

Launch of Documentary and Mapping
Teranga! | New Diasporas: Senegal
Daniel Lima
November 20, 2017 | Monday | 11am to 1pm
Sesc Consolação | Rua Lima Vila Nova, 245 - Vila Buarque br>
Daniel Lima and Raquel Borges conducted a survey with Senegalese immigrants in São Paulo and visited Senegal's capital Dakar, as well cities in its interior, as part of a research activity on the country's recent history, continuing European power over African land, and new migration flows. The content captured was edited and translated together with Senegalese immigrants living in São Paulo.

The growing demand by museums and art institutions in Brazil and around the world for acquiring or exhibiting 'indigenous art' puts us face-to-face with a problem that has aesthetic, ethical, and political implications. This encounter will discuss the state of the processes of indigenous cultural and artistic creation in Brazil today, and their possible contacts, tensions, confrontations, and interlocutions with institutional contexts of modern and contemporary art.

28.07.2017

The other way around: Talks with Objects/Music/Perspectives

An arena of encountering the world: Based on a series devised by Goethe-Institut South America, “Episodes of the South” is an attempt by PACT to shift perspectives.

The “Global South” cannot be identified by a glance at the map; a South that defies to be determined by geographical or economical determining, a South that is multifaceted, holds different ways of thinking, points of view and, at the same time, is conventionally considered to all intents and purposes below the North. Based on a series devised by Goethe-Institut South America, “Episodes of the South” is an attempt by PACT to shift perspectives. Over the course of three evenings, visitors are invited to take a seat with alternating international artists, sociologists, art historians and social activists in an arena-like auditorium and speculate about unfamiliar objects from renowned museum collections, discover music traditions from Greenland, South Africa and the Arab region, or re-negotiate strands of global narratives. “Episodes of the South – the other way around” is a journey as the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggests “to the south of theory” where another architecture of global culture can arise on the basis of which we can jointly tackle the pressing issues of our time.

A production by PACT Zollverein for the Ruhrtriennale adapted from a project of the Goethe Institut São Paulo in cooperation with Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, Museum Folkwang Essen and Ruhrmuseum Essen. Further information: www.goethe.de Supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

03.07.2017

Event brings Silvia Federici and feminist leaders to Rio de Janeiro

As part of the "Urgencies" Episode, the Goethe-Institut, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and DR Magazine are organizing an event on feminism in Gamboa, in the city center of Rio de Janeiro.

Witches, their knowledge, their land, their bodies and their work are among the topics to be discussed at the next edition of Urgencies! Feminism, to be held for the first time in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, July 16, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., at Grande Cia Brasileira de Mysterios e Novidades (Rua Pedro Ernesto, casa 21, Gamboa).

The event welcomes feminist activist Silvia Federici, of the International Feminist Collective, Giovana Xavier, professor at UFRJ and coordinator of the Black Women Intellectuals group, and Sandra Benites, a member of the Guarani Ñandeva tribe and a graduate student in Anthropology at UFRJ. DR Magazine and PACA (Program for Autonomous Cultural Action) will moderate the discussion.

In addition to a discussion with the guest speakers, there will be a pre-launch event for Federici's book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, translated to Portuguese by the Sycorax collective (published by Elefante). The book rethinks the history of capitalism from a feminist perspective, focusing on the relationship between the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries and the sexual division of labor, which confines women to reproductive work. In other words, it seeks to return to the history of witches in order to address the domination that persists in the present day.

In the words of Federici: "Why, after 500 years of capital's rule, at the beginning of the third millennium, are workers on a mass scale still defined as paupers, witches and outlaws? How are expropriation and pauperization related to the continuing attack on women? What can we learn about capitalist development, past and present, when examined from a feminist perspective?"

The series of events titled Urgencies!, each approximately eight hours in length, is a platform for discussion about contemporary issues. Each edition includes a panel of guest speakers whose work has received national or international recognition in the specific areas of the proposed discussions. The event is part of Episodes of the South, created by the Goethe-Institut, which seeks points-of-view and contributions from the South in the arts, science and culture (www.goethe.de/brasil/episódios)

PARTICIPANTSSILVIA FEDERICI
Born in Italy, Federici has lived in the United States since the 1960s, where she forged her feminist activism and collaborated with the black movement. Co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, she participated in the "Wages for Housework" campaign and was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. In the 1980s, she lived and taught in Nigeria, where she worked with women's organizations and fought against the structural adjustment policies being implemented in Africa. Her most recent books are Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Sycorax, 2017) and Revolution at Ground Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Traficantes de Sueños, 2013).

GIOVANA XAVIER
Giovana Xavier is a professor at UFRJ and coordinator of the Black Women Intellectuals group.

SANDRA BENITES
Born in the village of Porto Lindo, in Japorã, Mato Grosso do Sul, Sandra is a member of the Guarani Ñandeva tribe. After completing the South Atlantic Rainforest Indigenous Intercultural Teaching degree program, organized by the Federal University of Santa Catarina, she was nominated in 2014 by the Guarani community of Rio de Janeiro to take over pedagogical coordination of the Municipal Secretariat of Education of Maricá (RJ). She is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Social Anthropology at the National Museum of Brazil. She is a member of the Institute of Knowledge of Native Peoples-Jacutinga Village.

DR Magazine | www.revistadr.com.br
DR is a magazine of politics and culture made by women. It aims to offer conversation with close attention to tone, in which it is possible to have a voice without having to incorporate the language and gestures of regimes of “truth”. Its editors are: Ana Kiffer, Fernanda Bruno, Mariana Patrício, Oiara Bonilla, Tatiana Roque and Thamyra Tamara.
PACA - PROGRAM FOR AUTONOMOUS CULTURAL ACTION
The PACA Program for Autonomous Cultural Action expresses itself through regular activities that are free to the public, open seminars, textual production, work groups and other presentation formats, as well as collective dynamics of discussion and production. PACA was founded in 2014 and is organized by psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik, artist Amilcar Packer, mathematician and philosopher Tatiana Roque, and cultural critic Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz.

10.6.2017

“New Diasporas” investigates South-South (im)migration, with a focus on Senegal

focus on Senegal
Project of the Goethe-Institut seeks to reflect on the cycle of migration between the countries of the Southern Hemisphere

Following the effort to reflect on the cycle of migration that has emerged over the last decades between the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, the project New Diasporas proposes for its new edition in 2017 a deeper look at Senegal.

Senegalese immigration to Brazil is recent. Even though Senegal does not have internal conflicts like many countries on the African continent, it is still one of the poorest countries in the world (being one of the 25 countries with the worst HDI), which motivates the Senegalese to leave their country in search of a better life. Brazil became attractive to this people since the 2000s, when the South American country started to have more visibility abroad. The Senegalese represent today the second largest group to request refugee status in Brazil, lagging only behind Haitians.

The project New Diasporas: The Senegal episode anticipates a research trip by the artist Daniel Lima (Frente 3 de Fevereiro) and the producer Raquel Borges, in addition to a video workshop with a group of Senegalese. As a result of the research process, there will be an open event on the 10th of June, starting at 4pm, at the Goethe-Institut (Rua Lisboa, 974 – Pinheiros), with music, cuisine of the country, audiovisual presentations and performances. The presentations as well as the debates will include the participation of the protagonists of migration.

A program of the Goethe-Institut, New Diasporas held its first episode on Haiti, in June 2016, with Invisíveis Produções, with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The project integrates programming from the project Episodes of the South, which thinks other ways of seeing art, science and culture from non-Eurocentric points of view.

12.05.2017

Talk on Ernesto Neto’s “A Sacred Place”:
Huni Kuin: existence as a work of art?

The Goethe-Institut is proud to announce that it will be part of Ernesto Neto’s work “A Sacred Place” during the week of the opening of the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia on 12th May at 12pm at the Arsenale. The Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and six Txanas of the indigenous Huni Kuin will meet specialists, partners of the project Episodes of the South and the public. The questions to be addressed will include, among others, the status of contemporary art, exoticism, the appropriation and commercialization of indigenous culture and practices, the complex fusion between life and art and the intersections between ritual and performance.

Can existence, in and of itself, become a work of art? The question asserts itself in the work created by Ernesto Neto. In collaboration with the indigenous Huni Kuin, the Brazilian artist brings to the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia an indigenous ritual from the Amazon. The work - a hybrid, mix of installation, sculpture and performance - aims to bring to the here and now, in the time-space of the exhibit, the power of an ontology and of an epistemology anchored in magical thought.

Since the beginnings of modern art, Western art has experienced a fascination for primitivism. Now, in the post-modern era, contemporary art seems to have learned that there is a need to examine its own frameworks through the paradigms of other systems of knowledge, which are also contemporary, since they are also part of our time. Dialog and/or the impossibility of dialog between such diverse ontologies and epistemologies run through Ernesto Neto’s oeuvre and the life of the Huni Kuin people. The questions are many: What criteria to confront it with? How to understand it beyond stereotypes and without fear of the inevitable misunderstandings? To what extent is the work part of the art system? How to understand it aesthetically? Given that the work, as a mode of expression, does not exist autonomously, nor is it separate from the life of the Huni Kuin people, how does the work “resolve” the paradox? Can we consider it a unique contribution from the South?

From the Arsenale, Ernesto Neto issues a challenge to the public. “Exhibiting” the Huni Kuin, their traditional culture, their unique relationship with the rainforest, the artist appears to be elevating their mode of existence to the category of Art. It is up to us to accept the challenge.

04.05.2017

The event brings together voices from various fields around a surprise object in order to reflect on art history and material culture.

Why does art history always have to be told from the Eurocentric point of view? How would a history of art be narrated, for example, by African cultures or by Brazilian cultures?

Seeking to think other discourses in the field of art history and to examine the symbolic relationships that we establish with material culture, the Goethe-Institut organizes, in collaboration with the Casa del Alabado Museum, the fifth edition of the meeting Conversations with Objects.

Individuals from different fields, disciplines and areas of expertise have been invited to engage in dialog around an object taken from non-Western art history, with the purpose of opening it up to other readings and reflections. The object in question is from the Alabado Museum’s collection, and will not be revealed until the event.

The major distinctive feature of this discussion is exactly the surprise element in the confrontation with the object: with no previous preparation, the participants and the public are invited to share the position of producers of knowledge about the object, in a way that dismantles the hierarchy of art history discourse.

The format of the event also seeks to challenge the norm: chairs are placed in a circle around the object so that the public in attendance may occupy the position of the “expert.”

This fifth edition of Conversations with Objects will take place in Quito, on Thursday, May 4th at 6pm, at the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana’s Teatro Prometeo (Avenida 6 de Diciembre y Tarqui). The event is free and open to the public.

Conversations with Objects is part of the Episodes of the South project, created by the Goethe-Institut, which includes debates, research projects, and exchange programs, in addition to artistic and academic productions with new points of views and ways of understanding the perspectives and contributions from the South to art, science and culture in an increasingly global context. www.goethe.de/brasil/episodios

The Casa del Alabado Museum houses and values a collection of objects originating from most of the Pre-Hispanic societies within Ecuadorian territory, through an innovative museum proposal that stresses the aesthetic wealth of the artifacts and the spiritual dimension incorporated into the social life of these ancestral cultures.

Participants:

Juana Paillalef C.
A Mapuche wife, mother and grandmother, originally from the Maquehue territory, a region in Araucanía, which today is called Comuna de Padre las Casas. She earned a Master’s in Intercultural Bilingual Education from the Universidad San Simón, Cochabamba-Bolivia. Subsequently, she took the position of Director of the Mapuche Museum of Cañete – DIBAM –, where she has been able to provide support for and work alongside museum studies specialists on the Mapuche subject, achieving a reinterpretation of the history of the territory defined by modernization and decolonization of the MMC.

Pablo Lafuente
In 2014, Lafuente joined the team of curators of the 31st São Paulo Art Biennial. Prior to that he was editor of the journal Afterall and of the collection of Afterall’s histories of exhibitions. Currently, he resides in São Paulo and Porto Seguro, Brazil, where he is Visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia. From 2008 to 2013 he co-curated the Contemporary Art Workshop of Oslo, Norway. Lafuente is one of the participants in the Museal Episode, which is part of the Episodes of the South project.

Susana Torres
Teaches Art Direction at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). Studied Art History at the National University of San Marcos, Esthetics and Cosmetology in Toulouse, France, and Fashion Design in Lima. She specialized in Installations and Art Curatorship while working on Micromuseum, an alternative museum project she is part of. From her work, her Neo Inka Museum stands out for being an alternative collection of everyday consumer objects, that brings the concept of the Inca to contemporary times.

Patricia Von Buchwald Hanze
Studied Plastic Arts at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Juan José Plaza, in Guayaquil. Served as Director of museums and cultural centers in the Municipality of Quito’s Metropolitan District, taught on the faculty of Museum Studies at the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial, and Art History at the Universidad de las Américas. Subsequently, she studied ancestral sciences, humanistic psychology and a reconciliation experience with the people originally from America.